Rules

Eligibility

• Students in classes 9 to 12, or the equivalent (such as PU college or junior college), at any school. Built for schools across India.
• Teams of 1 to 4 students.
• A school or institution may enter as many teams as it likes.
• A student may be on only one team.
• Team names must be suitable for a school setting.

What to submit

Your entry is 4 to 6 content slides, exported as PDF, maximum 10MB.

A title slide and a sources slide are both required. Neither counts toward the 4 to 6. So the shortest valid entry is 6 pages in total and the longest is 8.

Name your file TeamName - SchoolName.pdf

Your deck must cover two things. They are sections, not slides. Most teams spread them across four to six content slides, and the presentation template shows one way to do that.

The issue

A real problem you have seen, described narrowly enough to act on. Who is affected, how badly, and why it has not already been fixed.

Solution & AI impact

Four things belong here:

• Your solution, and what the AI actually does.
• What already exists in this area, and why yours is different.
• What it needs to work, and where it would fail.
• How it gets built, in the short term and the long term: who does the work, what it costs, and how you would know it worked.

Sources

Every entry must include a sources slide listing every statistic, quotation, image and claim that did not come from your own observation. Name the organisation or publication and the year. A bare link is not enough. Where a figure comes from a study of one particular group, say so rather than presenting it as a national number.

Images must be your own, clearly licensed, or diagrams you made. Photographs of identifiable people need their permission.

An entry with no sources slide cannot score above 5 out of 10 for presentation, and any figure without a source is treated as unsupported.

Use of AI

You may use AI tools for research, background reading, and analysis. The writing, structure, and design of the slides must be your team's own work. Every team confirms this on the submission form.

Judges

Judging

Every entry is scored out of 40 by our judge: the problem is worth 10, solution and AI impact 20, and presentation 10. Ties are broken on the solution score, then on the problem score. The full criteria, with the descriptors used for every band, are in the judging criteria document.

Timeline

Prize

A total prize pool of ₹50,000.

First place

₹25,000

Second place

₹15,000

Third place

₹10,000

A winning team receives a single payment. Where the winner is under 18, prize money is paid to a parent or guardian account.

Certificates

Every team that submits a complete, valid presentation before the deadline receives a Certificate of AI Innovation, personalised with each student's name, their team name and their school. The top three teams receive exclusive certificates instead:

First place

1st Place Certificate

Second place

2nd Place Certificate

Third place

3rd Place Certificate

Every certificate is co-signed by:

• Dr. M.H. Balakrishnaiah, Chief Academic Judge
• Sam Irfan, Co-Founder, Birdspiracy
• Ishat Gangatkar, Co-Founder, Birdspiracy

Certificates are sent digitally by email after results are announced.

Publication and rights

By ticking the consent box on the submission form, teams give Birdspiracy permission to publish and share their presentation, team name and school name, in full or in part, on birdspiracy.com, on social media, in the press, and in promotional and educational material about the competition.

Your information

How we use your information: we collect names, school, class and email only to run the competition and contact participants. We do not sell or share it. Entries are published and shared only with the team's consent. See Privacy for details.

What disqualifies an entry

• Submitted after the deadline.
• Not a PDF.
• Fewer than 4 or more than 6 content slides.

How to submit

Registration and submission are two separate forms, both open from 1 September. Register your team first, then submit your presentation through the submission form before the deadline. The submission form requires a Google account, because it accepts a file upload. Use the same team name on both forms, spelled exactly the same way. One submission per team. Your entry is final once submitted, so check your file before you send it.

Anything not covered here: birdspiracy.competition@gmail.com.

Before you start